Steve Locke’s work addresses issues of blackness, queer identity, and love. Through a variety of media, Locke’s work moves between the personal to the political as the artist asks us to see intimate experiences as political and to take the political personally.

The installation when you’re a boy is a drawing-filled room in which one might find a boy alone as he discovers what it means to have a sexual body, to be queer and black, to live in a world at odds with who he is. From the forbidden regions of desire images arise, but are made impossible by all that surrounds him. A related experience, albeit at a different age, is explored in the multipart work, Rapture.

These internal physical sensations are the spark that gives rise to Locke’s work. It then moves outward as the body clashes with the political sphere. But these works are not propelled only by anger. Embedded within this encounter is a thirst for justice and an exploration of desire. There is also a deep expression of love alongside a demand for it, and for social justice, for the fulfillment of promises made, not quashed by the morass of history, prejudice, or politics.

“How do you learn to love? Who teaches you?” Locke asks in The School of Love. This multi-pronged installation moves through the often painful road to learning to love—oneself, others. To be loved is made treacherous, as Locke writes, “When every picture/movie/image/idea of you is a criminal/thing/object/void being killed over and over, how can you be loved? Why would you want to be? […] Some of what I was taught took a long time to unlearn.”

Keith Miller, Curator

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